Summary: ORIGINAL ARTICLE
doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00684.x
EXTINCTIONS IN HETEROGENEOUS
ENVIRONMENTS AND THE EVOLUTION
OF MODULARITY
Nadav Kashtan,1
Merav Parter,1
Erez Dekel,1
Avi E. Mayo,1
and Uri Alon1,2
1
Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100 Israel
2
E-mail: urialon@weizmann.ac.il
Received February 26, 2008
Accepted February 5, 2009
Extinctions of local subpopulations are common events in nature. Here, we ask whether such extinctions can affect the design
of biological networks within organisms over evolutionary timescales. We study the impact of extinction events on modularity
of biological systems, a common architectural principle found on multiple scales in biology. As a model system, we use networks
that evolve toward goals specified as desired input­output relationships. We use an extinction­recolonization model, in which